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Is the rise of populism over or only just beginning?

Ten years after the financial crisis, a leading theory says the political upheavals that followed should now fade away. Is populism's bubble about to burst, asks Simon Oxenham

Andrzej Krauze

By Simon Oxenham

ON 15 September 2008, investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, precipitating a global financial crash. In the years that followed, politics took an apparently unexpected turn. We saw Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of far-right movements in Europe after decades of steadily increasing social liberalism. Sweden is just the latest example.

Many are now wondering if this is the new normal. In 2015, Manuel Funke, then at the Free University of Berlin, and his colleagues turned to data analysis for an answer. They found that over the past 140 years, every major …